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worldview that the supernatural is a part of everyday life.
This idea is supported by the role that itinerant, or circuit
riding, ministers played in shaping the religious views of rural
Appalachians. According to Butler, “Early Methodist itinerants
invoked the dream-world images already endemic in postrevolutionary
society.” 70 He further points out that Methodist
itinerants had great faith in the ability of dreams to predict the
future. Some charismatic Methodist itinerants, such as Lorenzo
Dow, encouraged listeners to trust the supernatural revelations
contained in dreams and also encouraged their audiences to believe
that they could “locate lost and stolen objects, raise the Devil, and
perhaps cure diseases.” 71 These claims not only served to reinforce
the folk magic worldview that the supernatural is present in the
here and now, but they also legitimized and gave a Christian
foundation to this worldview.
Even though Appalachia became a meeting ground for a
number of diverse ethnic and cultural groups, there appear to
be several core values that these groups held in common. In
comparing the values of early black Appalachians with those of the
Cherokee, Perdue observes that:
Both emphasized living harmoniously with nature and
maintaining ritual purity; both attached great importance to
kinship in their social organization; and both were accustomed
to an economy based on subsistence agriculture. African and
Cherokee relationships to their environments reflected similar
attitudes toward the physical world. The spiritual merged
with the environmental. Common everyday activities, such as
getting up in the morning, hunting, embarking on a journey,
and particularly curing illness, assumed for both races a
religious significance, and even topographical features were
invested with religious meaning. 72
The values that Perdue ascribes to the Africans and the
Cherokees were very similar to those already held by the
Appalachian settlers and, as such, they tended to reinforce, if
not influence, the beliefs of the Appalachian people. The values
that emphasize kinship and the environment are very similar to
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